Biological Analogies in Marshall's Work

Abstract

Alfred Marshall, who once proclaimed that the Mecca of the economist lies in Economic Biology, is remembered more for the mechanical analogies contained in the appendices of his Principles of Economics. Subsequent revisions of Marshall based on the mechanical principles he incorporated into the theory of the firm (Robbins 1928; Pigou 1928), the theory of competition (Robinson 1933; Chamberlin 1933), and the theory of value (Hicks and Allen 1934), succeeded in completely removing the corpus of economic theory from the domain of biology.